The Last Bout of ‘03 – NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
by Derek Wilson on October 23, 2003 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
After testing the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, we have been very pleasantly surprised by NVIDIA. We mentioned last week that the 5700's new architecture might help to close the gap. In fact, NVIDIA has flipped the tables on ATI in the midrange segment and takes the performance crown with a late round TKO. It was a hard fought battle with many ties, but in the games where the NV36 based card took the performance lead, it lead with the style of a higher end card.
We are still recommending that people stay away from upgrading to a high end card until the game they are upgrading for is available. By that time, either new cards will have trickled out, or the prices will have fallen. We still don't have a way to predict what card will be best for you in the future. If you are dead set on getting a DX9 card, we recommend you look to the midrange cards.
Neither card can touch the 9700 Pro for price/performance right now. If the 9700 Pro is in your price range and you're looking for a better than midrange performer for a near midrange price, go ahead and pick one up.
The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra will be debuting at $199 after a mail in rebate. If $200 is your hard limit, and you need a midrange card right now, the 5700 Ultra is the way to go if you want solid frame rates.
If $200 is still a bit much, the Radeon 9600 Pro is a very healthy option; we have yet to see how the non-Ultra 5700 performs as it may also deserve some attention once it hits the streets.
What will also determine our recommendations in this segment is what clock speeds add-in card vendors actually ship the products at. We’ll be keeping an eye on that and update our recommendations accordingly.
Of course, we still have more to come in the form of image quality analysis. Our findings in that arena will affect what we recommend just as much as pure speed. Stay tuned for more.
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Anonymous User - Thursday, October 23, 2003 - link
it seems toms review puts into question ati's optimizations moreso than nvidia's image qualityAnonymous User - Thursday, October 23, 2003 - link
In any case,.....it's another round of new card releases and hopefully cheaper prices around for the"older" models.
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 23, 2003 - link
#19, I don't think it is a fanboy thing. It's an AT thing that's costing them their respect from other hardware sites and readers.Anonymous User - Thursday, October 23, 2003 - link
ati fanboys above dont look to happy :)Anonymous User - Thursday, October 23, 2003 - link
# 15, If someone writes a crappy review then he deserves all the problems and flak the come with it.gordon151 - Thursday, October 23, 2003 - link
#14, "The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra will be debuting at $199 after a mail in rebate. If $200 is your hard limit, and you need a midrange card right now, the 5700 Ultra is the way to go if you want ****solid frame rates****." Now you could say they dodged the image quality bullet on that comment, but that's really the only recommendation they made on the 5700 Ultra.When the new article comes out and they do an image quality analysis, if their findings are similar to that of HardOCP and TomsHardware the conclusion will be something similar to "5700 Ultra still for solid frame rates and 9600 XT for solid frame rates *AND* image quality".
BTW Derek I don't believe was even at the press event, that was Anand. Derek is the sole author of this article it seems and unlike Toms and HardOCP he didn't have any direct aide from other staff.
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 23, 2003 - link
#13,No, we don't need to bitch at every AT review. But when the conclusion CONTRADICTS the very data he supplies us, then something is seriously wrong. Wouldn't you say?
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 23, 2003 - link
#14, if anyone buys an expensive video card based on 1 review from 1 tech site, they deserve the problems that could come with it.Anonymous User - Thursday, October 23, 2003 - link
The review crowned a new midrange segment winner without dealing with image quality. What are they going to do, retract that later after their image tests? What about the people that bought the cards based on their review - and then they find out the cards have image quality problems?Other sites in the past when they discovered issues waited until they had done further testing before coming out with any review. Perhaps anandtech should have followed hardocp's lead, and instead of partying it up and brown-nosing at nvidia press events they should have been doing their image tests so they could put out a full review.
gordon151 - Thursday, October 23, 2003 - link
Do we seriously need the comments crying for the authors head with *EVERY* review? They already said they were working on an article which will do a study on the image quality tests and will be posted laters. This review will clearly stress the numbers and that's where they draw conclusions. Damn, give them a frigging break.